Ollie's Huskies Now Ranked 18th

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The Associated Press Top 25 is out and the Huskies (4-0) are 18th. It's a modest gain -- they began the year at No. 19 -- but it's progress nonetheless. And in mid-November, progress is what coaches are looking for.

As for the rest of the American Athletic Conference, Louisville is No. 3 and Memphis is No. 11.

Next up: UConn faces Boston College Thursday at Madison Square Garden in the semifinal of the 2K Sports Classic. Coach Kevin Ollie said Monday that he's looking forward to facing the Eagles, a longtime rivalry that ended in 2005 after BC jumped to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“It’s a great team right in our region here and we had a lot of wars in the Big East,” Ollie said, via the Connecticut News. “I remember a lot of them when I played at the University of Connecticut. We’d like to rekindle that rivalry again.”

During Ollie's UConn career, the Huskies were 8-0 against Boston College, and they are 54-35 all time, including winning 28 of the last 31 meetings.

So why, exactly, has it been nine years since the two teams faced off? When BC announced it was leaving the Big East, Huskies Hall of Fame coach Jim Calhoun vowed to never play them again.

“I wasn’t upset with BC," Calhoun told the New Haven Register's David Borges last week. "I was upset with decisions made, behind the scenes, which I’m not going to go in great detail about. But, in 2005, a lot of us kind of had to hold the thing together. They were a verbal, ‘Yes, we want to hold this thing together.’ But what they were saying and what was going on, not through the school itself but from the athletic department, wasn’t necessarily fact. So, from a selfish standpoint, to have a good rivalry in Boston, because I enjoy going back there every year … Rivalries are great, and BC should be a very natural rivalry, them being in the ACC and we being, certainly, at that level.”